City Name Generator

A city has to be announced

A village name can be modest. A city name is said by heralds, painted on gates and argued over in treaties. It should be easy to hear across a square and hard to confuse with the villages around it. The list here opens with Vessara Docks.

Capitals and ports on this page start from invented roots, then add a word that says what the city is for: a gate, a spire, a crown, a harbour, a quay. Fantasy cities skip the English word and join two invented pieces, so the name does not exist in a gazetteer. Real cities and canon cities from novels and games are on the block list.

Three kinds of city

• Capital. The root takes a civic ending (-gate, -spire, -hold, -watch and others), or the name is High … or … Crown. Use these for seats of government, temple cities and fortress-capitals.
• Port. Port …, or the root plus Harbour, Quay, Docks, Wharf or Landing. A port should sound wet. Do not give an inland capital a quay unless the river is the point of the story.
• Fantasy. One word, built from two pieces we wrote, with no English place-ending. Use it when the city is old, foreign to the viewpoint culture, or simply not meant to sound like a translated English town.

A coast needs both: a fantasy or capital name for the old city on the cliff, and a port name for the new docks below it. They can share a root (Veltha above, Port Veltha below) if you pick the root and reuse it. The generator will not do that pairing for you.

What not to borrow

Famous cities from other people's worlds are rejected, and so are real ones. That still leaves a duty on you: if a name makes every reader think of one book, do not use it, even if the letters differ by one. The block list catches the well-known forms. It cannot catch a private joke.

Pair a city with the towns that feed it and the kingdom that claims it. A capital called a village ending (-thwaite, -combe) will feel like the countryside grew a wall, which is a fine story if you mean it and a mistake if you do not.